As you might expect, the first landmarks that greeted us when we got into Texas were oil derricks. The land changed pretty dramatically, from hilly desert to grassy fields, once we crossed the state line, and the derricks moved slowly, quietly, up and down as the sun set. Our first stop was Odessa, Texas, a very flat, sprawled-out kind of city, and not a particularly nice place to visit. This was confirmed near the end of our stay, when an employee at the halloween store Eric and the boys went to struck up a conversation with Eric and told him how much she “hated it” in Odessa. But hey, at least they had a stone tablet engraved with the Ten Commandments in the local mall…
We drove on to Abilene, where we stayed a couple of nights and spent part of Milo’s birthday. The whole gun thing in Texas is much more of a thing than I had previously believed. In the Tex-Mex restaurant near our hotel, there was a legal ordinance posted in the window about not bringing open-carry guns inside, and then, when I was in Walmart picking up some decorations and wrapping paper, I noticed a customer with a holstered handgun at his side, showing a Walmart bag checker (i.e., security) the empty rifle carrier he had bought or was returning. Those kinds of things are so foreign to a sheltered Canadian like me! And then there was the bullet hole in our motel room window in Kilgore, Texas, which also had one of those ordinance signs in the lobby, and well… seriously, don’t mess with Texas…
But at least Milo’s birthday was fun. We got him a few gifts that he really wanted and didn’t take up too much space in our luggage, and played at the nearby Chuck E. Cheese before leaving Abilene. Also, when I was wrapping his gifts in the hotel lobby, one of the employees was falling over herself offering help, with stickers and scissors and tape, and then gave me a bottle of pop and a box of M&Ms from the tuck shop as a gift. She was so kind, as were most of the people we encountered in Texas. (If only hospitable and armed didn’t have to go hand-in-hand!) The second half of Milo’s birthday was spent in Frisco, a suburb at the north end of Dallas, where we went to Chili’s for dinner. Afterwards, we had a small vanilla cake in our room, in which I put six trick candles. Having never used trick candles before, I had no idea they would smoke so much as they relit over and over… so what started as, “Milo’s going to think these candles are hilarious!” went, in a matter of seconds, to, “Shit! We gotta put out these candles before we set off the sprinklers!”. In the end, we managed to avert setting off the fire alarms (ha ha!..uh…ahem).
Believe it or not, Frisco was a place we had planned to visit even before we left Toronto because of the National Videogame Museum located there. I remember the four of us talking about it on a stroll through Taylor Creek in spring, about this museum way out in Texas, near big and busy Dallas. And then a few months later there we were, exploring the very impressive and extensive collection of videogame artifacts from the beginning of the technology to the present-day. I’m not very interested in videogames, personally, but I really liked the 80s living room they had set up, complete with wood panelling, green rotary phone (like my parents used to have), a huge T.V. encased in faux wood, poker-playing-dog “art” on the wall, and an Intellivision console on the coffee table. They also had an 80s bedroom, which featured, of many things, a “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” movie poster and Depeche Mode band poster, a Rubik’s Cube, a yellow Sony walkman, a Pac-Man pillow, and of course an NES console with Duck Hunt loaded up. As part of our admission we each got a few tokens to play in the retro arcade, which was fun for Eric especially. I definitely give the National Videogame Museum two thumbs up! (Unfortunately, all the photos I took – and they were many – are sitting on my old iPad that was sent back to Toronto!)
After Frisco, and a single-night stay in Kilgore, we left Texas and moved on to Louisiana to spend a little time in Cajun territory…